Neo-McCarthyism With the Coen Brothers

For years, Cormac McCarthy has seemed to waver between two questions: "Am I Faulkner?" and "Am I Hemingway?" With the Coen brothers' film version of Mr. McCarthy's 2005 novel, "No Country for Old Men," we have an answer: He's Dashiell Hammett. Or at least he's the Coen brothers' new Dashiell Hammett. The Coens' obsession with Hammett has been evident since their first feature, 1983's "Blood Simple," which is a slang term for bloodlust taken from Hammett's "Red Harvest." In 1990, the Coens filmed a sort of "Red Harvest" in disguise with "Miller's Crossing," which mixed elements of the aforementioned novel and another Hammett work, "The Glass Key."

With "No Country for Old Men," which opens in the city on Friday, the brothers have finally filmed the carnage-on-the-Westernplains novel — albeit it an inferior one — they've always wanted, and have gone, well, blood simple.

It's a match made in Tinseltown. Despite their indie art-house personae, the Coens have always been Hollywood at heart, and have carved a terrific career out of winking at both crowds. Meanwhile, Mr. McCarthy reportedly sold the film rights to "No Country" before he had even written it, and the result is a book that reads like a novelization of a McCarthy novel made into a movie.

Exactly why Mr. McCarthy wrote "No Country for Old Men" in the first place isn't clear. After years of being a critics' pet, it's hard to believe he suddenly craved a movie deal. His prose, though stripped down compared with his earlier work, is every bit as solemn and portentous. And though he delivers his words with pop-existential dread, his cops and killers are stock figures, and the stolen drugs and money plot devices lifted from a hundred crime novels, from W.R. Burnett's "The Asphalt Jungle" to Jim Thompson's "The Getaway." The only difference between "No Country" and the pulp that preceded it is Mr. McCarthy's pretentiousness: "No Country" is a highfalutin genre piece with a nihilistic oil slick.

The Coens' movie follows the book to a fault, and then falls into it, especially its unsatisfying ending. While hunting in the desert, a deputy sheriff (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad: bodies, burned-out vehicles, a huge wad of cash, and a stash of heroin. Having never watched TV cop shows, he doesn't know that you don't just walk away with the goods without some sinister bounty hunter or aggrieved party coming after you. That someone is Javier Bardem as an assassin named Anton Chigurh, a killer so relentless he destroys entire families — though, despite a lack of subtlety that would make Schwarzenegger's Terminator blush, he has somehow eluded every law enforcement agency in America. (How this guy ever got through airport security is a mystery.)

There isn't much more to the plot (the book's sparseness makes "Red Harvest" seem like a Dickens novel). That said, the Coens just about make it work onscreen with their trademark aesthetics and a barren score. It's white-knuckle stuff literally from the opening scene. If "Blood Simple" and "Fargo" were your cup of tea, this film is your meat — red meat.

But what, exactly, does "No Country For Old Men" succeed at? The material is pulp, and the Coens play it like art. Roger Deakins's gorgeous cinematography lends the film the look of an early Terrence Malick film, but it's all wrong for this subject matter. It's as if Sven Nykvist were photographing a movie made from an Elmore Leonard novel.

The screenplay, by the Coen brothers, preserves all the solemn conceits in the book, including a hit man who flips a coin to determine the fate of his victims and a cracker-barrel philosophizing sheriff, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who ruminates on what a terrible place the West has become with killers like Chigurh, who slaughter humans with cattle guns. The sheriff's sentiment is particularly offensive coming from the author of "Blood Meridian," a novel set in the Old West in which people are shot, scalped, and skinned alive on virtually every page. Compared with the scalp-hunters in that book, Chigurh seems like a gangster in a road show production of "Kiss Me, Kate."

The pleasure of great crime thrillers is that they absorb us without intruding on our real lives or on our serious thoughts. They fulfill our fantasies for living unlived lives — What would I do if I were that character or placed in that situation? — then return us to our own world satisfied. But this isn't enough for Mr. McCarthy or the Coens. With "No Country for Old Men," they seem to think that by making us feel the skull fragments splattered on our clothes we've somehow experienced art.